Demo charges

[Stimo]

I'm curently playing a mission in which there is a wonderful 2-story house that could provide me with excellent lines of sight on almost the whole battlefield.

Too bad I'm deprived from those LOS because of another house.

So I decided to blow up the problem.

2 engineer teams are working on it for 13 minutes now, using up to 15 demo charges and the annoying little house looks damaged but still stands its ground.

You may think this looks like a whining post, and obviously it is.

To get rid of the obstacle, would you have rather used cannons ?

[General Lee Irked]

Demo charges will put holes in the wall but will not AFAIK collapse a building.

HE fired from a medium tank will collapse the building however be prepared to use a good chunk of your HE ammo load.

Mortar rounds can do the same. Size of the rounds fired will determine time of collapse.

What I do not know is if a combination of demo charges, HE and Mortar will collapse the building quicker.

Hmmm. time to test

[agusto]

To get rid of the obstacle, would you have rather used cannons ?

I ve never tried to demolish a building in CMx2 with demo charges. Usually i use artillery or tank cannons for that purpose and it has always worked for me.

[womble]

I just gave it a try in the scenario editor:

Forces: American Engineers and 4 Shermans vs 2 storey modular medium.

First test.

Use the engineers to blast out all 4 walls of the building.

Area fire at the (non-existent any more) ground floor (Level 1) walls with one tank on each side.

Total 75mm HE rounds expended before collapse: 70

Second test:

Same as first, but omit the engineers blasting.

Total 75mm HE rounds expended before collapse: 69

Note: it took 67 rounds to remove all the ground floor walls. Only 2 more and the building collapsed completely.

Third test:

Same as second but with all tanks firing at the same wall.

Rounds before complete collapse: 67.

Note: Both levels of the front wall were destroyed by the 63rd shell. None of the other walls were looking at all damaged at the time of collapse.

Conclusions:

• Engineer wall-blasting doesn't affect the actual structure of a building in any way.
  
• It doesn't matter if you knock down all the walls, or just one. It's the total blast applied to the building that matters.

[Michael Emrys]

It must be variable with the building. I recently demolished a building by having a single Sherman fire at it less than a dozen times.

Michael

[womble]

It must be variable with the building. I recently demolished a building by having a single Sherman fire at it less than a dozen times.

Michael

Oh yes, it's certainly widely variable by building. The Modular building types are by far the toughest (and provide the best cover). By contrast a "barn" is made of matchsticks and spit. I haven't tested, but extrapolating the results of the Modular building to a less sturdy type, I'd suspect that demo charges would still be incapable of bringing the thing down.

[Stimo]

I thank you for your diligence !

[Stimo]

I ran my own tests and came to the same conclusion : engineers are useless regarding urbanization plans.

But I noticed something : if I give a BLAST order from further than 20m from and obstacle, they will run to it but won't blast it.

Is there an explanation ?